Work & Impact

What’s the value when you hand us a problem

You, as a founder, have a problem, or a specific goal, but you might not know the actual problem. Which means the brief is loose. You might need to fix a metric, a product feature or your overall marketing strategy, or maybe you see that your growth somehow stalled with certain unit economics.

Here are just a narrow list of six situations we’ve handled recently, what we’ve done to address them, and what’s the potential impact to a business.

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A broken, falling revenue line is diagnosed at its low point, rebuilt through execution, and climbs to value above where it startedRevenueBusiness problemDiagnosisExecutionValue
Situations

Six problems needed to be solved

Each of these situations were real engagements, abstracted. The specifics stay with the client.

01

The numbers are trending the wrong way

Most founders treat this as a performance problem. It usually isn't.

The cost per acquisition climbed over the past few months. The team thought it made all the right decisions. And in most cases, they did. The issue isn’t whether the surface level decisions were right or wrong, but whether we’ve made the right splits and looked at each segment, audience, and channel specifically. The issues usually lie in little changes that when you put them all together, they compound and break things.

Blended CAC rises, but split by segment only one segment is climbing, starting where a bid event stopped firingCACMonthsBlended CACSegment ASegment BSegment Cbid event stopped firing

What we do

  • We start looking at each conversion event from the form to each ad platform, and assess the signals and the quality of data
  • We review each platform’s historical changes, and match it to CAC, and other key metrics
  • Rebuild the cohort level analysis and in some build the growth trackers for CAC at multiple funnel stages
  • On top of funnel stages metrics, we break things down by customer segments, each with its own unit economics
ValueYou stop guessing and allocating budget against a diagnosis that was reactive, and incomplete. In one engagement, three months of rising cost turned out to be caused by a few issues, a critical bidding optimization event that messed up the channel campaign performance.

02

Too busy to think of marketing

Starting from zero is hard. Optimizing what you started is harder.

When there is no website and no presence, there is no way to get anything in the pipeline. The founder is excellent at work and while his business was driven by referrals, the founder knew there is only one way to grow. Hire the best team to worry about marketing.

A funnel builds stage by stage, brand, site, lead flow and channels, then a lead lands as a booked callBrandSiteLead flowChannelsBooked call

What we do

  • We started with the brand, the value add, and most of all the competitive differentiator
  • Rebuild the site, the lead flow, and ensuring the right leads book a call on the spot
  • Tighten up each acquisition channel to hit the right numbers, and double down on what worked
  • Setup a content creative process, so the authority keeps building while we also respond to demand
ValuePaying clients in the first month, and an engagement that paid for itself, covering acquisition costs and the retainer costs.

03

The business grew faster than expected

Once growth happens, operational excellence is what keeps you going

Bookings, deals, and as a result of that the revenue started to throw the founder for a loop. The anxiety started to get real. Contracts were landing in the inbox, new requests coming in daily, payments were tracked in excel… The founder was the system of record, and it was sabotaging the entire operation.

Scattered deals, payments and contracts snap into organized CRM columnsDealsPaymentsContracts

What we do

  • Coordinate all the business processes, payroll, insurance negotiation, compliance checks
  • Immediately had to turn on a comprehensive CRM with all the required pipelines, lists, attributes, etc. Attio was implemented all the way through
  • Trackers were missing, so we built APIs into Attio to get snapshots on all deals and track payments appropriately
  • New views on revenue trackers for state by state compliance
ValueThe founder is focused on the actual product and value delivered. Not bugged down by operational matters, trackers or multi-state tax exposure.

04

Patterns are something to watch for - proactively

When things shift, usually the answer is already in front of you. You only need to be proactive, and know the signals.

The marketing budgets were spent across the year evenly, or depending on specific growth targets. The issue is that the founder and even investors expect the same performance, or even better, month over month. When things don’t come in as expected, we call it a performance issue, when in reality we deal with seasonality effects.

Two years show the same seasonal efficiency curve, and an even budget split is rebuilt to follow the seasonYear 1Year 2EfficiencySame shape,two yearsBudgetEvensplitSeasonalbudgetJanDec

What we do

  • We pulled multiple periods, year over year, rather than trailing quarters
  • Testing the patterns at keyword and search term level, where there is consistency across 2 or more years
  • Separate brand from non-brand, and look at each year over year
  • Take out specific issues with the accounts, and carve those out from the analysis
  • Then, rebuild the monthly budgets around the seasonality, and not against it
ValueThe efficiency between different periods in the year was roughly 50%, and we confirmed across two complete cycles. Then we matched that budget to those trends, making everything perform better, and allowed budgets to shift into other channels.

05

Affiliate and partnerships usually run unattended

Affiliate is one of those channels where most often is running without on auto-pilot.

The affiliate or referral programs were set up at launch, and was ignored month over month. Not only the software setup was ignored, but there was an assumption that if you pay per transaction (and not CPC or CPM), things should work well.

A partner network where fraudulent partners are cut and strategic partners are doubled down onfraud, cutdoubled down

What we do

  • We audit the economics by partner end to end, including the platform fees no one paid attention to
  • We had to restructure the payouts against current volume and lead quality
  • Separating contracts by long-tail partners from strategic ones, and implement different contracts to match
  • Took over the outreach and management, as a partner channel without relationships is dead in the water
ValueImmediately saved thousands of dollars due to fraudulent transactions, increased volume from the ones that mattered, and setting up new engagements for brand amplification

06

Something got broken without anyone noticing

When something gets broken, the real constraint is the willingness to do it and own it, not the skill

When a site got compromised, and no one would be able to reach them from Google, something had to be done fast, as every hour was costing them authority and had reputational risk, things that would take years to build.

A compromised site is rebuilt on clean infrastructure and the domain re-routed within eight hours8hdomain + DNS

What we do

  • We jumped in, no questions asked, and diagnosed the scope, and getting precision on what’s broken
  • Rebuild the entire site on a clean infrastructure, rather than cleaning up something that was compromised at its core
  • Once tested, we had to migrate the domain, nameservers, and DNS and put the site behind a CDN
  • Got everything live the same day
ValueReputational and authority risk mitigated, in eight hours - start to finish
How we work

Growth relies on judgment and ownership

Building and even deployments got faster and less expensive. That’s not where the ultimate value resides. Deciding what and when to build, knowing when the answer you get is sound and complete, is the part that will move the needle forward.

The seams between functions are the problem

Coordination is hard, and that’s why for years now we’ve had PMs, project and program managers, all focusing on capturing all the right requirements and getting the work done flawlessly. That’s where most of the delays came from.

Recognize one of these?

Most conversations start with someone describing situation one or situation three without knowing which it is. A thirty-minute call is usually enough to tell you, honestly, including when the answer isn't us.

Book an intro callOr meet the team first